Neil Turok
speaker
2,693 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 22 Jun
Neil Turok’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Why is the Higgs mass so much less than the Planck mass?
And within the normal standard model, that's just tuned.
We just pick these two numbers, right, to fit the real world.
But now let's ask why are those numbers so different?
Well, if the Higgs is made out of this scalar, which is connecting the Higgs mechanism with gravity, it's pretty exciting, then it's totally natural for the Higgs mass to be exponentially smaller than the Planck mass.
So there's a hope that this picture will solve the hierarchy puzzle.
No.
Well, that's to do with Peter Higgs.
Okay, so Peter Higgs, I mean, he was a much more shy and withdrawn person than me, notoriously shy, and probably a lot more humble than me.
Peter came up with the idea of the Higgs boson in the early 1960s when there's no experimental evidence.
It was a pure theoretical concept, but it was absolutely radical at the time.
Peter Higgs really thought about, well, he was inspired by superconductivity, which is a real phenomenon.
And somebody called Anderson made a field theory model of superconductivity and realized that this is the way to essentially, well, the magnetic fields are expelled from superconductors.
And Anderson understood that could happen if a particular kind of scalar field condensed
It's a composite field in the superconductor.
It's made out of electron pairs.
It's called a Cooper condensate.
Anderson had realized there's this amazing mechanism which has the effect of giving the photon a mass inside a superconductor.
Higgs said, oh, wait a second, we could use this in particle physics.
So he generalized this method to a relativistic field theory.
Showing 341–360 of 2,693 · page 18 of 135
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